by James Goss
Somewhere in the middle of all this wailing, the infighting began. As each scrambled to prove that they, and only they, were grieving more than anyone else, the counter-accusations began, that you weren’t grieving enough, because you weren’t a true fan. Which is when the hashtag #HarryKiller emerged. Jeanette invented it. She decided who it was, which of them amongst the group had killed Harry. Like the Witchfinder General, she unearthed and named and shamed and executed the fans. Some fought back, some committed suicide.
Now, this is where the press got confused. No-one actually committed suicide. They simply closed their accounts. But in fandom, this was called ‘suicide.’ And treated as such. ‘47 angels in heaven now. 47 lives lost because of Harry.’ Or, as Jeanette put it ‘47 #HarryKillers executed.’ She emerged as the Queen of Blood and Hellfire. The inquisition became a pogrom. It raged online, a rage that was becoming incoherent and unfollowable.
I STOOD BACK from all this. Did I feel guilty? No, not for a second. I had allowed a terrible thing to happen. That much was true. But I hadn’t had my finger on the button. Jeanette had.
I ran analyses. Or tried to. I wanted to find out who had spread the most hatred, had caused the most shocks, had actually been most responsible for the death of Harry Paperboy. Because it certainly wasn’t me.
The results were inconclusive. I really wanted it to be Jeanette, but I wasn’t sure. A news site that specialised in piechart politics did very much the same thing, and they said it was definitely Jeanette. I still wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. A website had said so, and since it was a news website, it was definitely true. And so, the real #HarryKiller was revealed. And the angry mob turned on their killer queen.
I FELT REALLY bad. Sometimes, I wondered if I was the only person actually mourning Harry. And then I remembered his mother and his three sisters, and I felt bad. He was just a kid. But I wasn’t responsible for his death. I don’t kill children.
PERHAPS, OUT OF all of this, a lesson had been learned. Certainly, those nice people with their Moleskine notebooks wrote a lot of articles saying that it had. But no one could agree about what had been learned. And the PaperGurl Army simply swamped the comments page on each article angrily saying how wrong it was in block capitals. Which the sites themselves didn’t mind as traffic went through the roof, so they commissioned even more think pieces on the subject and basked in the ad revenue.
In the end, the only thing that stopped it, seriously, was the announcement of new tour dates by One Direction. Suddenly, a lot of teenage girls took off their black armbands and started buying tickets. A month later, Harry Paperboy was all but forgotten. And if you’re reading this and wondering who One Direction are, then that kind of proves my point.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DEATH OF MR CUDDLEZ
“I DON’T SUPPOSE there’s any chance I can get the rice cooker back?”
Jay put down his cup and wiped a finger round the froth before answering me. “I’m sorry?” he drawled. But then, Jay drawls everything, like he’s voicing Mr Sleepy Sloth in a kids’ cartoon. Which is ridiculous, because Jay is huge.
By which I do not mean fat, obese or stocky. But huge. Like the progeny of an American Footballer and an SUV. At first glance you’d assume Jay’s wearing one of those novelty superhero fancy dress outfits. Then you realise—no, he really is built like that. And squeezed behind a tiny table at Costa, licking coco foam off his finger and trying to hide a broken heart.
He looked at me. He has blue-green eyes that don’t blink much. I wish I had eyes like that. At university they meant he never went home alone. “Let me just check. I tell you I’m getting a divorce and you tell me you want your wedding present back?”
“You’ve only been married six months,” I pointed out. “And now you’re single, you’re not going to be using a rice cooker. ’Cause carbs.”
Jay shrugged sadly. It looked like a momentary indecision by the Waitrose meat counter. “Fair enough,” he sighed. “You know far too much about gays. Are you sure you don’t help out when we’re busy?”
Jay’s always wanted me to be gay. At uni this would involve him buying me shots and then throwing me on his Jedi bedspread. But it never really went anywhere. The handy thing about being a lightweight was that I could always run off to throw up when he started striding around his room in a pair of shorts trying to belch seductively.
But that was all long ago. A few months ago, Jay had got married to Vladimir, clearly The Love Of His Life. Jay was a corporate lawyer for Sodobus, Vlad was an imports manager. He was as tall as Jay, but broom-thin. You could just about imagine them taking up the right amount of space in a double bed. But I’d rather not, as it’s always weird thinking about your friends’ sex lives. I’ve made my peace with it. I imagine they had a wild fortnight and then settle down to cream teas and long country walks. (Out of interest, does anyone actually really like long country walks? I mean everyone says they do, but in practice they’re an awful thing.)
Anyway, Jay had just told me that he and Vladimir were splitting up.
“Okay,” I said, “We’ll leave the rice cooker to one side for a bit. Why are you splitting up?”
Which was when Jay told me about Romeo.
Here’s me & my teddy #ToplessSelfie.
#hungoverRomeoSelfie.
Any #BigSmoke friendz with a spare floor I can crash on next week? #Auditions.
Who wantz to buy me a holiday? I fancy New York!
Here’s my new #tattoo design. Any1 want to pay for it? #Poor Student.
Romeo is lonelio. Need cuddlez.
BRING ME HUGZ AND BACON.
Hey @JayMonstah, you guys look amazing!
ROMEO WAS, IT turned out, a drama student in Wolverhampton. A shuddering glance at his Twitter feed told you that he spent a lot of time on Twitter, posting topless photos of himself and his teddybear, and asking people to give him hugs, bacon, cuddles, work, money and attention.
“How do you know him?” I asked Jay.
Jay gave me another of his miserable mixed-grill shrugs. “I don’t. Well, I didn’t... but you see...”
IT HAD ALL started when he and Vladimir got back from one of their holidays. They’d posted a lot of pictures (I hate friends like that, but then, I never really go on holiday, so I guess I may as well see what a beach looks like). But Jay and Vladimir had filled Twitter with the two of them, on beaches, in treehouses, surfing, drinking cocktails. The two of them looked perfectly happy.
Barely had they climbed on the Heathrow Express home than they’d got the following comment from Romeo. ‘Hey guys! Next time, hide me in yr luggagez! #RomeoNeedsAHoliday.’
This had been repeated a few times. Then Romeo had uploaded a couple of pictures where he’d photoshopped himself into their holiday photos. ‘This is what I’d be like. I take up NO SPACE, REALLY!!!’
“DIDN’T YOU FIND that creepy?” I asked Jay.
He looked at me blankly for a moment. “Look, it’s easy to say that kind of thing after the event. Hindsight’s a great thing,” he paused. “If you’re a smug arsehole.”
“Oh-kay, but still...”
“To be honest, it was a bit sweet. And silly. You know, naff. And the attention was kind of nice. When you get married... I mean, when you get gay married, you kind of feel as though the world stops looking at you. But Romeo’d be there. You know, noticing everything we did, and commenting, and popping up and being nice. And then, when he had an audition in London, we offered him the sofa.”
“You offered?”
“Well, he sort of invited himself, but we agreed. And he came round with a bottle of wine and he was very polite and so earnest and...” Jay petered out awkwardly rubbing his hair. “I mean... the thing is, Vlad and I didn’t have an open relationship at all. Or anything like that, in any way. But, you know, he’d come round, he was so young and naïve and sweet and we’d drunk the wine and, while he excused himself to go to the bathroom—”
“He excused himself?”
“Is that what I think it is?”
Jay nodded. “And it was lovely. I mean, you know, as I said, once you get married, you kind of think... well, it’s lovely to be wanted by someone else.”
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS, in hindsight, predictable, and reached its peak in a weekend away at Alton Towers. “The wildest rides were not the roller coasters,” said Jay. “If you see what I mean. Huh, huh, huh.” One weakness about Jay. On the rare occasions he made jokes, he underlined them in highlighter pen. As if that made them funnier. Huh, huh and huh—three barks from a bored and distant dog.
For a while it had been clearly brilliant. Both Jay and Vlad had sort-of known they were being used and paying for endless meals and rounds of drinks and little gifts, but it was all “sweet,” insisted Jay. And yes, sometimes, he and Romeo would hook up when Vlad wasn’t about, but that just made it feel furtive, and kind of even more fun. Until the inevitable time when Jay came home from a cancelled gym class to find Vlad and Romeo in bed.
Turns out, they’d both been carrying on with him behind each other’s backs.
“ODD REALLY,” SAID Jay. “I wonder what would have happened if I’d just shrugged and laughed”—huh, huh and indeed huh—“and climbed into bed with them. Instead... I don’t know. I suddenly went all Enid Blyton. Is that right?” No. “I started shouting. And Vlad started shouting. I don’t know what caused it all. But I felt—stop me if I’m being crazy—weirdly as though I was being wound up to it. And Romeo, he just sat there, while we fought and screamed about him. He looked... pleased.”
The row had been furious. Furious in a neighbours-knocking-on-the-walls way. (This was an interesting thing to learn. In London, if people hear screaming next door, they do not call the police. They bang on the wall with a broom. Something that would, I’m sure, help me at some point).
DUSTER: What’s up? You’ve been quiet.
ME: So. I may have a new target.
I COULD SENSE that this was an Assignment. Neither Jay nor Vlad were exactly heroes here, but they were definitely victims. But what had Romeo got out of this?
The great thing about social media is that it is all about now. Where are you now? What are you eating now? Who are you with now? People rarely travel back through their timelines unless they are hungover or getting a divorce. As much as we dedicate ourselves to recording the moment, we forget that we also annotating the past. And it’s quite easy for a stranger to work through that.
Romeo was a gift. He had no sense of privacy. His Facebook account was wide open—he thought it wasn’t, but his pictures were all public, and they told quite the story. His little face scrunched up on countless Megabus journeys off to see ‘The Boyz.’ The names of the boyz would change. I found Vlad and Jay quickly enough, but going back through was Peter and Juan, Stevie and Ryan, Bill and Ted, Bill and Ben, Simon and Garfunkel, oh, I’m making them up now, but you get the picture—a long list of couples. And it was easy enough to find out about what had happened to them. There was a litter of heartbreak and changed relationship statuses.
A typical pattern of Twitter would start with Romeo being:
@victim1—hey, in townsies tonight! You around for a quick natter? #RomeoLonelio.
@victim2—here’s me having a brilliant time with @victim1. Thanks for lending him. Your so lucky.
Megabus megaexcited seeing @victim1 and @victim2 #cocktails.
Three tired fellas lolz.
HazTheSadz, back to real life #Wolverhampton. Thx @victim1 @victim2.
Hey @victim1 @victim2 how dare you go on holiday without me!?? :)
Comparing tanlines with @victim1 @victim2.
Duvet hogging with @victim1 @victim2.
Sorry @victim1, used all of yr moisturiser. @victim2 said it wld be ok!!
@victim1 where are you? Out with @victim2 :(
#drinkies with @victim1 while @victim2 works to pay for #drinkies.
Must get job in the big smoke so I can spend more time with @victim2 @victim1.
And on it went. Fucksake, he was only twenty-three, and he’d gone through the coupled gays of London like nits through a primary school. Romeo had to be stopped.
I HAD TO build a honey trap. I had never done this before. Sketching it out idly, I got:
1. be gay
2. invent perfect boyfriend
3. laugh about our wonderful lives on Twitter
4. get Romeo’s attention with some foreign travel and a whiff of money
5. and then...
6. something.
7. I mean, not kill him. Really, that’s not the answer to everything.
First, where to get a boyfriend? I needed to do this quickly. Tricky. As far as I could tell, it took real gays weeks and sometimes months to do it, and they needed to have a lot of sex. I needed to get a boyfriend fast, and without the sex.
I stuck my toe in the water and joined a gay dating site, and targeted the profiles which said, ‘I’m not looking for sex.’ They sent me pictures of their genitals, so I figured I’d misunderstood something. Also, I’d been hasty here. The problem with getting a ‘real’ boyfriend is that they were real, therefore they’d become aware of Romeo, and so a little suspicious if he suddenly vanished. Especially when I vanished at about the same time. Not that I was definitely planning on killing him, but, you know, if it became absolutely necessary then I was setting myself up with an extra complication here. So.
I then thought about hiring a male escort. I figured it would be a relief for them, just to pop round for the odd drink and a chat and no actual sex. But they turned out to be horrifically expensive. And there was also the danger that they’d wonder why I was insisting on taking so many photographs of us together. Aside from the paper trail of bank details and transactions, if they ever actually met Romeo they’d fall foul of his divide-and-conquer routine—he’d be bound to try and see them without me and then it would either all come out, or I’d get a huge bill the next day for services repeatedly rendered.
So, I turned to the giant banks of online stock photographs trying to find happy gay couples, one of whom looked a little like me. The problem was, no-one looks like stock photo models. Once I’d spent a fortune on plastic surgery and special Hollywood teeth, I’d then have to explain why me and Geraldo spent our entire time high-fiving each other on beaches at sunset. Or, on the rare occasions that we had rows, we’d do it in our immaculately tidy kitchen and get someone to take photographs. Also, stock photo models only ever wear their jumpers tied round their neck, like they’re advertising the 1980s or something. And I’d either have to buy the pictures or explain away all those watermarks.
With stock photos out, I was starting to feel a little desperate. And then, thank the gods, I stumbled across #TeamGeeks. A whole tribe of gays who spend all of their time saying, ‘I am such a geek.’ They take so many pictures of themselves, reading comic books, drinking posh coffee, walking someone else’s Pug, all the while pulling ‘Quizzical Face.’ Quizzical Face is best described as half ‘look at little me’ and half ‘I’m having a stroke.’ So I suppose ‘look at little me having a stroke.’ That sounds smutty. I’ll start again. If you want to try it for yourself, hold up a coffee mug as though you’ve never seen one before and then raise one eyebrow at an imaginary camera. There you go. That’s ‘look at little me having a coffee, don’t mind if I do.’ It works equally well with running marathons, hot air ballooning, open sandwiches, going on a rollercoaster or taking the Northern Line.
The fantastic thing about Quizzical Face is that everyone doing it looks a little bit alike.
The other great thing about #TeamGeek is that they all have beards. All I had to do was get a tufty beard. Pull Quizzical Face. Buy the cheapest web designer glasses Specsavers offered. And I could pretend to be one.
Oh, and buy a Star
Trek uniform. The ultimate #TeamGeek achievement appeared to be getting a fairly identical boyfriend, dressing up in Star Trek uniforms and pulling quizzical faces together. Like you were a mirror image of yourself all grown up telling yourself that your lonely childhood was all okay now.
Brilliant. I could steal a whole wodge of photos, and no-one could tell. Even better, it’s fairly easy to photoshop yourself in a Star Trek uniform and stick yourself into a picture. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, just paste your head over someone else’s in a Star Trek uniform. See also, onesies. Because yes, #TeamGeek wear a lot of onesies, still. It’s like they’ve signed an unholy pact with Primark to keep the fashion going.
While I grew my beard, I assembled my fake identity. I would be Markus, because I’d always fancied that as a name. My boyfriend would be Trent. He would be an online interface designer. I would be a digital strategy manager. No one really knows what either of these jobs is, but it involves buying things from Apple geniuses and drinking a lot of coffee. We’d met on Guardian Soulmates—or in the column thing that they still run which is mostly about quite nice women in their early twenties meeting awful men who work in Shouting and have a thoroughly miserable time. (She: “I would quite like to meet him again, I think. Perhaps.” He: “She didn’t shout enough.”) I mocked up a column for Markus and Trent. We’d met, had quite a 7 out of 10 time, but bonded over the bad service from the wine waiter, and revealed that we each thought the other was ‘a nice kisser.’ A snap of the article was my first Tweet as Markus. Trent was all ‘omg you haven’t posted that LOL’ and things went from there. Over time Trent got a bit less like a cheerleader as I got the hang of the two of them.
